The chips intended for the human mind were the very latest and best efforts of nanotechnology. They had ganglion threads to tie into their sectors and signal features that would allow them to talk between themselves, creating a web. This would facilitate the flow of information from any one of them to the pertinent synapses. And there were two hundred thousand on a single wafer each containing a gigabyte of data in well-arranged files, which hopefully the brain could access at will, a cornucopia of human knowledge, art, literature and science.
Although several people from the lab had volunteered to be the first guinea pigs in this trial, the overlord, with cunning foresight to cover his tracks in case something went amiss, delegated the job to a trusted aide, Bob, who was just under Eileen in authority. He was instructed to perform the experiment in total secrecy, in a separate location, with only a few technicians present to monitor brain waves and vital signs. He knew that she wouldn’t agree to any human trials without months if not years of preliminary tests, 'baby steps' he called them. But he was so flush with the animal results, so optimistic, so monoscopic of success, that he wanted a trial right away and being a billionaire he got it. In fact, he got two. As for recruits Bob posted a small notice in a local blood bank that test subjects were needed, with a reward of three hundred dollars for a day of mind experiments. This got him just the type of applicants he desired, the broke, the homeless and the faceless.
Bob interviewed six applicants, nowhere near the lab but in a small, rented office space near the blood bank on Telegraph avenue where the experiment was to take place. His questions focused on two points, the sanity of the subject, as he didn’t want anyone with mental issues as a model, and secondly, the anonymity of the person. In this query he was very discreet. He didn’t want the potential subject to guess what he was getting at. But he wanted to be sure, in the event of a worst-case scenario, that he could sweep the whole thing under the rug without anyone following up on it.
For his first subject, Bob chose a German youth named Hans who spoke good English. He’d come here to visit, overstayed his visa and had been drifting aimlessly around the country for two years, exploring America. He worked odd jobs under the table for food and money but moved on every few months, with no particular friends and no letters home.
It was the first week of June, warm and sunny and Hans was making his weekly pilgrimage to the blood bank for an easy ten dollars when he spotted the small notice on its bulletin board. He thought these three hundred dollars would be just the ticket he needed to get out of town. He’d been sleeping with the other hobos in People’s Park for two weeks now and realized that with so many students milling around and school out there were no jobs to be got. The blood bank was his only income. He was blond, handsome and had high hopes. He wanted to see L.A. and Hollywood and maybe make it big. So he donned the strange looking skull cap, sat in the chair and swallowed the wafer. All the while the administrator sat across from him and chatted away about the weather, the news, all sorts of trivialities, trying to engage him in small talk, saying it would take some time before the results would come in so they might as well pass it in conversation. Bob reminded him over and over to speak up if he felt any odd sensations or thoughts.
At the other end of the table sat two of Bob’s trusted technicians at their screens, one monitoring his vital signs, the other his brain activity. Nothing at all happened in the first forty-five minutes, and our administrator was almost running out of talk when one technician noted a slow but steady rise in brain activity. Bob asked the boy bluntly: "What do you feel?"
"I don’t know" said Hans. "I feel something; I feel like I’m waking up. Yes, I’m starting to see things, images. Wow, I just saw some sort of chart with the whole history of cars on it, from the first ones invented in the eighteen-nineties. Now I see other charts, lots of charts and pages of writing. Wait, I’m starting to hear music too, it’s a symphony, Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique, but how did I know that. I never listen to that stuff. It’s too bright in here. Can we pull down the shades?"
The technician on the brain scan, Frank, grabbed Bob by the arm to show him that his activity was off the charts. The other tech said his heartbeat and blood pressure were rising rapidly.
"Jesus me, I’m seeing a whole lot of things now. It’s all starting to come together. I can smell all of you from here. Now there’s more music playing in my head, all at the same time, louder and louder. What is this? It won’t stop, it won’t stop."
At this point, he started to panic and stood up. They weren’t unprepared. Bob administered a strong sedative from a needle lying ready in a case in his pocket. It worked its magic within a few seconds, and Hans collapsed on the floor, asleep. They had a cot ready in the closet to the otherwise naked room and laid him down, all the while debating what to do next, to bring in more help and who and how and all the complications each would entail.
The shot they gave him would have put the average person under for a good eight hours, but in twenty minutes, before they’d decided on any course of action, he woke up again. At first, he was happy, thanking them profusely for the best dreams he’d ever had, sitting up and clasping their hands. But then he began ranting about all sorts of things, non sequitur, saying he’d discovered this and that, the mysteries of the universe. He was talking faster and faster, incoherently, and his blood pressure was climbing sky high. He started to scream in agony, holding his head in both hands. Bob told his two assistants to leave immediately, and they did, scared and perplexed. Then he slowly and reluctantly unboxed one more needle he had in his other pocket and gave him one last sedative, terminal.
Bob sat in the gloom of this dingy room with the lights out and the curtains shut till well after dark, pondering the experiment. He wasn’t worried. He was cold and logical. He’d imagined every possible outcome and had a plan for each. What engaged his thoughts was the changes to be made for the next experiment.
When the street grew quiet after midnight Bob folded the limp body into a large duffel bag and carried it to his car right outside. He drove to an abandoned wharf at the desolate tip of Alameda, the old World War Two shipyards, stripped of everything, a flat wasteland of rubble just a few feet above the constant lapping waves of the Bay. Here he shouldered the bag once again and tossed it from the end of the rotting wharf into four feet of bay water. There was no one else in sight.
Although this was a giant setback, he kept it a secret while work at the lab went on. Bob realized that the input to the test subject’s brain was far too much for him to control, so he decided on a scaled-back wafer for one more experiment. He chose the same model they’d given to the dog, Lucy, containing only twenty thousand Nanochips and instead of programming them with the entire contents of Wikipedia he had his lead programmer, Frank, downscale to a few thousand volumes of scientific data and a full library of music, art, history and culture. Surely a human mind could handle what a dog’s had.
The applicant he chose this time was a young woman. Her name was Claire. She wasn’t homeless but just one step above it, scraping by at a minimum wage job cleaning dishes, living in a dump, overweight and over shy, with no friends and no future. Her hair was a frizzy red ball, negatively accentuating her rotund torso. She wore thick, dark-rimmed glasses, spoke quietly and looked down at the floor most of the time. Bob considered her just the sort of test subject he needed, even thinking of the Cinderella story and what a change he could bring to her life. She wouldn’t have to work a dead end job ever again. She would be the subject of articles and interviews, famous and smart. He was half right.
In the same room, the same wires were reluctantly hooked up by the same two technicians, duped with a threat from Bob that they were complicit in the last mess but that the sponsor had resolved that matter and a success in this one would redeem everything. Bob babbled away, sometimes pausing from his own interests to ask her where she’d grown up and gone to school. At the forty-five minute mark the brain scan again showed some changes, this time less pronounced than before. Bob asked her how she felt and she answered: "happy."
"Do you see anything in your mind, hear anything, what are you thinking?"
"I do feel something changing in my head, like lights coming on, blinking different colors. I see an article. It’s about gene splicing. I can read it, but I already know what it says. Now I see other articles, lots of them and music and pictures."
"Is it pleasant?" Bob asked, nervously.
"Yes it is. It’s kind of like I’m daydreaming but still awake. I see this room too and it’s so bright. Is the experiment over? Can I take this cap off now? I can feel every wire connected to me and signals flowing through them."
Bob checked the screens. Her vital signs were stable and her brain activity about ten times above the norm. This all seemed very good.
"We need to leave it on just a while longer, but everything is looking fine. By the way"he asked, "can you tell me how many people died with the sinking of the Titanic?"
“I don’t know, or wait, it was one thousand five hundred and three" she smiled.
Bob clapped his hands in delight, and the two technicians breathed a doubly deep sigh of relief.
They spent another two hours with her, talking and asking questions. She was brim full of talk and up to every query. After that Bob sent his two helpers home and invited her to a local eatery for a bite. It was a dimly-lit Italian restaurant. He wanted to drive her there as it was ten blocks away, towards Oakland, but she was so flush with vitality she insisted on walking. All along the way she wouldn’t stop talking about the beauty of the trees and houses they were passing, the colors, the sights and sounds and smells of the city. It was as if she was experiencing it for the first time, with baby eyes but an adult mind. She was intensely happy, and Bob was happy too.
When they were seated at a table and handed menus a slight problem arose. As Claire scanned the entrees with deep scrutiny, she began muttering, ‘no, no, no.’
Bob asked if anything was the matter. He quickly decided to celebrate with a prime rib dinner and a carafe of red wine.
"I can’t eat any of these dishes. They’re no good for me."
"It can’t be all bad" Bob said. "Why don’t you order a salad and maybe some fresh bread?"
When the waiter came Bob had his feast, and Claire demurely ordered a small salad without dressing or onions or pepper, just lettuce leaves and a few cherry tomatoes and a fresh pitcher of water to complement the one she already drained. During the meal she was oddly picking at her salad, looking down mostly, only glancing up to stare strangely at other patrons there, then back to her salad, scrutinizing it, forking it, but still conversant on a multitude of subjects mostly relating to foods, metabolism and human chemistry. Bob attributed this to her shyness and the strange settings. She was no social butterfly and probably never ate out. He thought for a moment that he should have chosen a more outgoing patient. But he also surmised that she was already looking into her weight issues and decided this was an excellent prognostication for her metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly.
After dinner, he walked her another ten blocks to her apartment. It was dark now but Bob was in a glow of success, leading the way. At the doorstep of a rundown, gray, three-story building he gave her the envelope of money and told her that he would show up early the next morning and take her for a follow-up test. He would pay her the same amount again and told her to dress well as there were people he wanted her to meet. They parted under a streetlight with an awkward hug.
After a night of broken sleep, scheming of plans and possibilities, with more than a few apprehensions butting in, Bob rose before dawn and sped to Claire’s apartment. He’d told her he would drop by around eight but at six he was standing before her door. She didn’t answer at first, so he knocked louder, calling her name several minutes. There was no reply. Unable to contain himself or prolong the mystery, Bob slammed the cheap wooden door with his shoulder and it popped open. The spectacle before him answered to his worst fears.
The room was in shambles. Claire sat in a ball on the couch, knees against her chest, arms around her knees, tears streaming down her cheeks. She was rocking back and forth as if to console herself. The entire floor was littered with paper, some crumpled up, some the stray pages torn out of books and magazines. The kitchen was equally a mess. The fridge door was open and all of its contents disgorged on the floor with smashed jars and food and broken plates covering it. One other door was open with the light on. It was the bathroom. Glancing inside he saw less destruction, a bottle of mouthwash spilled out, a toothpaste tube squeezed onto the mirror. But on the floor lay three open, empty pill bottles, their contents probably flushed down the toilet. He quickly picked them up and looked at the labels but had no idea what they meant. So he pocketed them as clues to what might be going on. Thoughts raced through his head of schizophrenia, of seizures or anti-anxiety medication that she hadn’t told him about at the interview. He knew how to find out.
He called Frank on his cell, waking him up. "Is your wife there?"
"Yes, but she’s getting ready for work." Frank muttered.
"Well tell her she’s taking the day off and to stay put. We have a real emergency. I’ll be over in a few minutes." He ended the call before Frank could even reply.
Frank was one of the technicians present at the trials. His wife, Nancy, was a nurse who could very well tell what the medications were. Bob hurried over to Claire and told her in a low voice he was going to take her to people who could help her. She replied meekly, "I want to get out of here."
"Good” he said. He bundled her up in a jacket, grabbed her purse and led her by the hand to his car.
Frank lived with his wife in a cute little house in Albany with a small front yard filled with flowers. As Bob pulled up, they were both standing at the front door. They assisted Claire from the car to their dining room table where she sat, quietly, while Bob updated the couple in a hushed voice in the kitchen on all he saw, showing Nancy the pill bottles.
"Yes, these are anxiety medications, strong ones. If she hasn’t taken them, she might be feeling very ill. Let me talk to her."
Bob and Frank remained in the kitchen discussing what to do.
Bob said, "this might only be a glitch, a minor setback. She’s still talking lucidly. We need to get her back on her medication and study her. We need a controlled environment. Look, if you could watch her for a few hours, I can find a place, a safe house, and hire a few round-the-clock nurses to look after her until we figure this thing out. I can pass her off as my niece with some mental issues. Who knows, in a few days she might be fine and our experiment a complete success."
Nancy called from the dining room and asked them to bring out a pitcher of water with ice. She was sitting beside Claire, holding her hand, possibly taking her pulse. Claire seemed calmer now, looking around the room in a sort of dazed wonderment.
"She seems to do better with women than men," Bob said innocently.
"Well look what you two men just put her through." Nancy replied sarcastically.
"Frank told me the whole story last night. He can’t keep a secret when he’s feeling guilty of something" she added, looking straight at Bob, whom she had met before and always disliked. "Go find her a place to stay. I can recommend the nurses. Her pulse is a bit fast but nothing to worry about. She’s still disoriented. Make sure you find her a nice house with all the creature comforts. I heard about your empty office lab. I can make a call to get her prescriptions refilled and Frank can pick them up, so go, get out of here Bob before I lose it."
Bob glared at Frank and left abruptly.
Bob returned in the late afternoon with good news. He rented a house with three bedrooms, for nurses to stay over, on a quiet street in an affluent neighborhood. It was fully furnished, and she could move in tomorrow. He asked how she was doing.
"She has moments of deep anxiety, wringing her hands and others of talking nonsense, rapidly. Giving her hugs seems to calm her down. We tried to get her to eat lunch with us but she would only take a few celery stalks and an apple. All afternoon she’s been sitting on the couch. We gave her the medications hours ago and she seems sleepy now, but if you turn on the television, she freaks out and starts screaming. Nice work Bob."
This was Nancy’s report, but it was better than the worst Bob had feared.
"Thanks so much for all your help you two. I won't forget it. If she can just sleep here on the couch tonight, I’ll be by first thing in the morning and she’ll be out of your hands. I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done."
He walked over to Claire. "Now you stay with Nancy tonight and tomorrow we’ll have a big new house ready for you where you’ll get all better. I think everything is going to work out fine, I really do. Goodnight Claire."
Bob left. Frank and Nancy sat with her another few hours, talking softly, consoling her, giving her a blanket and pillow to lay on. She fell asleep. They ate dinner and retired early to their bedroom, tired from all the commotion of the day. When Nancy awoke at dawn and entered the living room, Claire, with her jacket and purse, was gone.
Being anonymous is a double-edged sword. If you find such a person, you might get away with whatever experiment you like, and no one will know. But if they slip away, there’s no way to track them, no one to ask, no trail to follow. They vanish.
When Nancy roused Frank with the news, they both agreed that they’d had enough. It was time to put a stop to these criminal and reckless proceedings. They went to the lab together, arriving before Eileen and told her everything they’d witnessed. She was shocked at Bob's recklessness, betrayal, and jeopardizing the whole project. Frank begged her forgiveness for following his orders and tendered his resignation. She told both of them to go home and that nothing would be decided until she talked to the boss. She knew he was the culprit and Bob his minion. She was quivering with rage and anger, trying to draft some response to this insult without jeopardizing the whole project, as he held all the cards. But before she could make that call Jaime, by chance, stepped into her office to request a long overdue vacation for him and his staff. Before he could speak, she told him the whole story. She paced back and forth all the way through it and declared she would resign her position, so violent was her outrage. But Jaime calmed her down a bit and called a few other colleagues into her office, and within an hour it was decided to put a moratorium on all activity, take a breather, rethink things through, especially before confronting their sponsor. After a break, with rested minds and calmed nerves they could tackle the situation anew.
This all happened on a Thursday. That afternoon Eileen had a long but tempered conversation with her boss, who, like the manipulator he was, denied any responsibility, laying it all on Bob, suggesting he must have misunderstood him when he expressed his wish that things might move along faster. She’d expected this, that he'd hide behind his pawns. But she kept her cool and negotiated what she wanted, a break for most of her staff for two weeks, and meet with him face to face with her top programmer, while he toured the facility in person, review their progress, and personally settle the matter of Bob.
It’s an easy thing for a billionaire to solve people problems. In one brief phone call Bob was told that he was being transferred, with higher rank and pay to a similar project on a remote island, though scaled down quite a bit. He was reminded that there might be a few legal difficulties arising from recent events and a trip out of country might be timely. The next day Bob was on a flight to a place where the weather was always beautiful and the natives friendly. He was told to slow down and relax. A lab would be set up with only a few staff. This would take weeks and he had no need to report back until it was operational. He should tan and sip Mai-tais on the beach and blend in with the locals, learn their ways. This was his reward for unquestioning fidelity.
Jaime won his break without even asking, more than he expected. To placate Eileen the sponsor announced through a PA that everyone would be taking any cruise they wanted, along with their spouses, on any line to any destination, all expenses paid. He wanted the lab empty for his private visits, except for Eileen and Frank, who could explain all their progress. An hour later stacks of brochures were distributed and Jaime, with his feet on his desk chose Alaska. As his small lab was in a far less secure building outside the main gate, Eileen decided to have the whole staff come in the next day and move all the test chips, the computers and equipment to the larger facility. Eileen wanted these two labs integrated for a long time but they’d always been too busy. The next day with forty hands at work, it was done.
